From Extracurricular to Extraordinary: The Day 4 Students Became a Rock Band
Shout out to Mr. Reyes and the Legacy staff for helping our students find their passions!
At the end of an All Ednovate Staff meeting last October, one of our teachers casually introduced and brought up four students up to the stage. With little urgency or fanfare, one plugged his electric guitar into his amp, another sat behind a drum set, and one of the students grabbed her mic in one hand while cooly pulling her hair back with the other hand. Our teacher announced that this was the first time that this group, Los Leones, was going to perform for an audience. Their debut performance was going to be in front of over 220 people! What an opening gig.
I ran up to the balcony seats with my son to watch, as they tuned their instruments. After a couple of plucks of the guitar and a check of all of the drums, it got quiet. I could feel the nervous energy of the band. I don’t think I was the only one to feel it either, because the staff started cheering, sharing their positive energy for encouragement with our young musicians.
And with a deep breath, drumsticks counted the band in.
What I heard took me back to my days as a sixth-grader, riding in my parents’ car to school, listening to KIIS FM and Rick Dees in the morning. All of a sudden, from the stage I heard “Angel Baby,” and the students were making it sound as great as I heard coming from the radio and from Angelica back in 1991. As a teenager, I loved this song and bought it on a cassette-tape single to hear it again and again. For the first time in decades, in the exact pitch and tempo, the band brought me to new heights. On the balcony, I was dancing with my son as Los Leones brought back so many great memories.
On the floor, our teachers were on their feet. They too, moved by the strength of the vocals and band’s coolness, rose up and were cheering. What was the end of a PD felt like the beginning of a concert!
The best part of this is that the band, feeding off the energy of the crowd, only grew more in confidence. Their smiles were beaming; they were connecting with the crowd, working us, and feeding off the positive energy that their talents inspired.
At that moment, I saw students being valued and celebrated for their unique gifts. I saw them getting affirmed. I knew that they would be hooked to mastering more songs and nailing more performances. And when they have their first concert, I am buying tickets, albums, and t-shirts from Los Leones.
Extracurriculars like band are essential components of the high school experience because students in high school are exploring and discovering who they are. They need avenues to try out new things--inside and outside the classroom--to see what sparks them from within, what they are good at.
One of my mentors, Ted Sizer, author of “Horace’s Compromise,” once told me: “High school students are there to try on many faces, and as educators, we need to give them the space to do that. Once they find a face that fits, then they are able to learn at unprecedented levels.”
At Ednovate, we want to ensure that students have a chance to discover what they are passionate about. This means that at our schools, we have sports, clubs, dance programs (check out our Esperanza Dance Team on CBS here), travel programs, cooking courses, robotics, and more...so students can try on all types of faces until they find one that fits.
It is my hope that all of our students have the experience that Los Leones had, where their interests created a community; that community created a band. And that band created music--music that brought joy and smiles to a bouncing and dancing crowd of educators one glorious October afternoon.
Oliver Sicat, CEO